In The Wanting, Russian-born architect Roman Guttman sits by his picture window in Israel, designing another postmodern house when a head flies by. Then the window shatters, and so does Roman’s life. The head is that of a suicide bomber and it will continue to appear throughout Michael Lavigne’s unsettling novel.

Although he quickly recovers from the physical damage, Roman has an increasingly hard time returning to his daily life. He keeps seeing the head out of the corner of his eye, and he shocks himself by beating an Arab-looking man on the street — an incident he later cannot remember. He also has a hard time keeping tabs on his daughter, a 13-year-old who is increasingly coming under the sway of radical Jewish zealots plotting against the Palestinians.

As Roman descends into true mental illness, he abandons his work and his daughter and sets out to find the village and family of Amir, the young suicide bomber. He doesn’t know why, just as he can’t explain his outburst of violence against an innocent stranger, but is compelled to leave the city and wander in the desert. He’s found dehydrated, sunburnt and dying by Amir’s father, who takes him in and cares for him against the wishes of his family and neighbours.

Meanwhile, Roman’s daughter Anyusha keeps a notebook of the conversations and actions she undertakes with her new, radical religious friends, and we see her being drawn ever further into a murderous plot.

We also get the point of view of Amir, the dead suicide bomber, who haunts his victims almost lovingly: he too is searching for a reason behind his own actions, and like Anyusha, is slowly drawn toward radical violence.

All three of these characters are attempting to fill some void, all three pushed in extreme directions by the circumstances of their environments.

There’s a large section which gives us Roman’s back-story, as a younger man in Moscow. Growing up Jewish under the Soviets meant living a second-class life, denied opportunities and persecuted for the happenstance of birth. Yet we see here that Roman doesn’t harbour excessive hostility to his persecutors; rather, he simply wants to find a way to live and be happy, without caring overmuch about politics. However, he’s in love with a young refusenik with close ties to the West. He knows she’s in love with — and hopes to join — a man in Paris, but again, he accepts what life brings him. When she is arrested and sent to the gulag, she’s allowed to hand her baby daughter over to Roman who then emigrates to Israel with her.

As a result, Anyusha never knows her mother and grows up believing herself abandoned. Since Roman disapproves of religion of any sort, she’s drawn to find out why, and ends up coerced into trouble.

Author Lavigne skillfully weaves these three voices around each other as the novel progresses, and indeed seems extraordinarily knowledgeable about the different locales and cultures. Lavigne, a Jew, sympathetically portrays the convoluted, morally ambiguous environments these rudderless characters strive to navigate and builds up an intense narrative drive. He presents no easy answers to their problems and neither does he beat the drum for any ideal.

All three of his main characters are portrayed fully and sympathetically, and the voices of Anyusha and Amir are especially life-like. It’s a complicated story with no clear path for anyone — just like the locale in which it’s set. Lavigne is a careful and talented writer and this is a fine follow-up to his acclaimed first novel, Not Me.

Michel Basilières is the author of Black Bird (Vintage Canada). He teaches creative writing at Humber College and the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.

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